DPRK Forum

Getting away from the summit and six party talks for a while, and today, we will look at some more oddities.

Known in the DPRK as the Peace Village and in the south as Propaganda Village. For those that visited the DMZ has seen this from the south, but I do not know if North Korea includes it in the official tour or not (for those that been on the North’s tour, perhaps you can shed some light on this). I started looking at this oddity on Wikipedia, but a lot of information was not readily available otherwise.

According to this entry, the North claims:

A guidebook published in the north states: “In this village located in the Demilitarized Zone is the Panmun Cooperative Farm embracing over 200 households. The village has a kindergarten, creche [day care], senior middle school and a people’s hospital.” At various times field workers and building workers are seen in Kij?ng-dong.

I tried looking for official information on the Internet about Panmun Cooperative Farm, but little was found. According to the same entry:

many in the south believe that Kij?ng-dong was built within the DMZ purely for the purpose of propaganda. The village reportedly has no residents except soldiers. At night lights come on in some of the buildings, but they turn on in the same buildings every night at the same time.

I remember seeing on Crossing the Line and Inside North Korea regarding the DMZ, propaganda and the one-up wars. One banner from Crossing the Line had a slogan saying “Come to Pyongyang” and Inside North Korea discussing how these villages were created to entice people to defect to the paradise north. My question is, since the DMZ is fortified with land mines, troops with itchy trigger fingers and other deadly things, why would the North want others to defect there? Ahh, the oddities and irony.

Of course, a source of interest is the tallest flagpole in the world:

The world’s highest flag tower stands at the entrance of Kij?ng-dong (160 meters tall) flying a North Korean flag. This tower was not originally as tall as it is now, but when the flag pole in Daeseong-dong was extended, thus making it taller than the Kij?ng-dong pole, the North again quickly extended their pole taller in what some have called the “flagpole war” (?? ? ??).

That is interesting to me as well, but what I am wondering about is the propaganda that’s been a hallmark of the DMZ for many decades. Changes in policy have taken place such as the ceasing of insults getting cast from each side in 2000:

The propaganda war in the DMZ fell silent today for the first time in at least 50 years, and President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea could be heard declaring that ”the danger of war on the Korean peninsula has disappeared.”

Just a day after talks between North and South Korea ended in Pyongyang, the South ordered an end to anti-Communist broadcasts that its military had transmitted for decades from giant loudspeakers along the heavily fortified border with North Korea.

The order was issued in response to North Korea’s decision on Tuesday to switch off its loudspeakers, which had blared anti-South insults over the demilitarized zone through the years.

The end to the broadcasts was one of several steps the two nations have taken to signal that the half-century of hostilities on the divided peninsula are indeed coming to an end. They were also hoping to dispel critics who had questioned whether a broad agreement reached at the recent summit meeting between President Kim and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Il, would actually lead to specific actions toward peace.

I never heard the loudspeakers blare insults back and forth, but on the documentary Crossing the Line, Korean War veterans were discussing how the loudspeakers also talked about how if soldiers defected to the north, they will get money, women, housing, etc. Oddly, it seems Joseph Dresnok’s voice was on those loudspeakers. I guess American defectors, while hated, were golden propaganda opportunities. That must of been the ultimate conundrum.

Are the buildings really empty? Do normal folks really live there? I do not know.